[Pitchwife]

Ibrin, thanks for posting the quote about the severed heads of the slain being used as ammunition during the Siege of Gondor. I had thought of that, but neglected to include it in my post.
Another example that has come to my mind was Gelmir being hacked to pieces by the Orcs before his brother Gwindor's eyes at the beginning of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
Perhaps one of the reasons that warfare is described more grimly in the Silmarillion is that Silm was written in a much more distanced, 'annalistic' style than LotR. Maybe Tolkien just couldn't bear to describe his own experience of war any closer, without that filter of talking about things that happened ages ago?

obloquy, slightly (but not entirely) off-topic - an appalling number of people in our time happily consumes meat without wanting to think about having to kill a living creature and handling a bleeding carcass (not me - I've butchered chickens with my own hands). Live animals are cute, and dead animals are tasty; the transition tends to be blithely ignored. One can always choose not to see what one doesn't want to see (which probably is what most of our politicians who send people to war do). Of course people in Middle-earth had their intestines ripped out, but did we think of that when we first read LotR? If you did, good for you; I didn't.